Not too long ago, this page challenged local elected officials to be as creative and determined with ideas to fund our schools — both in academics and in deferred building needs — as they were in finding ways to fund a new minor league baseball stadium for the Chattanooga Lookouts.
In the Hamilton County Commission meeting Wednesday, a couple of ideas emerged — one pretty good, another not so much.
Noting the nearly $1 billion in deferred school maintenance the county faces, Commissioner Joe Graham, R-Lookout Valley, introduced a resolution to create a dedicated fund for the county school system’s capital needs. He said the fund would act as a savings account to help the county get ahead of its facilities crisis, and county officials would be able to dedicate future surplus money to that fund — surplus revenue like what might come from selling a piece of property or from federal government assistance.
A second and related resolution would direct 100% of future excess revenue from payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, known as PILOTs and tax increment financing, known as TIFs, to that fund.
These agreements encourage development while earmarking the revenues that result from that development. For instance, a TIF was employed to create a development zone around the proposed stadium site and a big chunk of the resulting tax growth expected to come from it will be used to pay the debt on the bond issue to fund the stadium’s construction.
We think the facilities dedicated-fund idea is a good one, but there’s a little fly in the ointment on at least the second part of the proposal.
The PILOT and TIF growth revenues already are used to fund schools operations, according to Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Justin Robertson, and the system needs that money to hire teachers, cafeteria workers, add bus routes and the like.
That said, pardon us, but diverting money from the day-to-operations of schools, including academics, to school buildings sounds a bit like borrowing from Peter to pay not Paul, but Peter again but with the same money. In other words, where’s the gain?
We agree with Graham that “We can’t keep kicking the [school facilities] can down the road.”
But we also know we already don’t spend enough on school operations and academics, as our test scores show. Local employers continue to make it plain they can’t find enough work-ready local graduates.
The County Commission is expected to vote on both items next week, but we found it interesting that Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp told commissioners they should take a judicious approach to the issue, adding that he’s rarely comfortable with government moving too quickly.
“This is a conversation that would be best served to be had over a period of time,” Wamp said. “There’s no reason to do it in a rush in part because there’s not a TIF or PILOT imminently … in the next eight days that would be affected by it.”
We agree.
Wamp and Robertson recently announced a facilities working group dedicated to evaluating urgent and future building needs across the school district, using a 2018 facilities study as a baseline. That study recommends a three-phase, 10-year plan at a cost of $891 million.
We applaud Graham’s initiative and concur that the can-kicking needs to stop, but taking school money from one pot and putting it in another doesn’t get us there.